Thoughts on my First 90 Days at Stripe

_{I initially intended to only share this post internally at Stripe. I have since tweaked it a bit in order to share it externally in the spirit of learning and growing in public.}

Having recently reached my 90-day mark at Stripe, I wanted to take a moment to reflect back on this period and, on the flip side, to also reflect on what I want to dig deeper into in the upcoming weeks.

Feedback is critical

One thing I’ve struggled with so far is understanding how well I am onboarding to Stripe and how I am doing as a new hire in my role. With so many moving pieces, I’ve found it difficult to gauge how successful or not I have been in my role thus far. Because of this, I started asking for a lot of feedback over the last few weeks. I’m a big advocate for 360 feedback. I’ve asked for feedback from my boss, my peers, and my direct reports. Thank you to everyone who took the time to provide feedback. I know that providing good and actionable feedback is a time-consuming process and I truly appreciate everyone’s time. If anyone has more feedback to provide, please feel free to share it with me (anonymously or not).

Move with urgency

Stripes (this is how we call Stripe employees) have a high sense of urgency and it’s contagious. It’s very exciting to be surrounded by motivated people that are at the top of their game and move fast. It gives me more energy and drive. Things at Stripe also move very fast: decisions are made quickly, feedback on proposals is given quickly, initiatives and scope change quickly, etc. Folks had advised me about this value during my interview process and I was somewhat prepared for it, but Stripe’s high sense of urgency exceeded my expectations.

Meeting people IRL

In my short time at Stripe, I’ve had the privilege of attending 2 offsites: a team offsite in NYC and a manager summit in SF. These offsites provided an incredible opportunity to meet my team and peers early in my tenure here. They helped accelerate my rapport with these folks and created a faster culture of trust in my opinion. They also provided key opportunities to have deep-dive conversations on important topics both at the team offsite and within my organization’s leadership group at the manager summit. I look forward to the next offsite and the great conversations that will come out of it (in Montreal, anyone?)!

What I want to dig deeper into

As I reflect back, I’m pleasantly surprised by the amount of knowledge I’ve gained in my first 3 months. It’s easy to lose track of what I’ve learned so far or how much I’ve grown without taking time to reflect back on my tenure at Stripe. That said, I know there’s a ton more that I want to dig deeper into and learn. Here’s a non-exclusive and non-prioritized list of what’s top of mind for me at the moment:

I want to write more. This blog post is my first attempt at writing regularly and stemmed from feedback that I recently received (did I mention that I love feedback?). I’ve found that Stripes who excel at their work tend to write a lot and are very good at distilling their thoughts into posts. It’s a skill that I want to spend more time building over the next few months.
I want to spend more time playing with queries from our data warehouse. I’ve consumed a lot of powerful dashboards that folks have built but I haven’t spent enough time building my own queries and dashboards. I know there’s a lot of value from an API perspective that can be gained from this data and so I want to carve out the time to do that.
I want to learn more about the different ways our deployments can fail. [The rest of this item is redacted for confidentiality reasons]
[The rest of this list is redacted for confidentiality reasons]

Photo by Saulo Mohana on Unsplash